ABSTRACT
Anton Chekhov whose death we briefly recorded last week, may or may not have been a man of genius. Though his countrymen esteemed him once, the rest of Europe was not quite convinced. But he at least strikes the reader as the most typically Russian of the modern Russian writers whose names are known beyond the Muscovite dominions. He differed from Tolstoy in not being pledged to a stereotyped fanaticism: from Gorki in that he had not been made acquainted with strange bedfellows by poverty. He was first a doctor in the service of a municipality, and afterwards a country gentleman. He was not troubled by the censor, or the police, or the Procurator of the Holy Synod. He had neither grievances nor enthusiasms to distort his vision, and no personal reasons that we are aware of for pessimism. That is the principal reason why his pessimism is interesting and instructive. He grew into it gradually as his art evolved, as he observed life and, looking beneath the surface, found that there were riddles which he could not answer. At first, indeed, he was quite superficial and merry. He wrote for comic papers, and his vein was roaring farce, indulged without much consideration for the proprieties. In his second stage he was still farcical, but the farce was merely the grotesque setting of tragedy. The third and last stage was gloom, illuminated indeed by lambent rays of irony, but not by any sallies that can fairly be considered jocular. The writer had discovered, not that life was real and earnest, but that it was futile - that nothing could be made of it, even by the most earnest and brilliant of men. . . .
